‘I spent seven years fighting to survive’: Chelsea Manning on whistleblowing and WikiLeaks

Perhaps the most revealing part of my conversation with Chelsea Manning is what she doesn’t say. What she can’t or won’t talk about. It’s not that she doesn’t have a whole lot to say – she does, particularly about technology and how it can be used against us. Her job as an intelligence analyst for the US army, using data to profile enemy combatants – to be targeted and maybe killed – gave her an acute understanding of its potential uses and abuses. She understood the power of Facebook to profile and target long before theCambridge Analytica scandalerupted. “Marketing or death by drone, it’s the same math,” she says. There’s no difference between the private sector and the military. “You could easily turn Facebook into that. You don’t have to change the programming, just the purpose of why you have the system.”Sign up to the Art Weekly email

Read moreShe understands this world; the overlap between military and civilian technologies that has caught us all in its dragnet. It’s her role in it that’s more opaque. She seems, still, at the beginning of a process of understanding what she did, what it all means, where she fits in. How in 2010, as Bradley Manning, aged 22, she downloaded and leaked, via Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks,750,000classified and sensitive documentsthat revealed America’s secret diplomatic cables and Iraqi and Afghanistan war logs. How she was caught, court martialled and sentenced to 35 years in prison. And how, in one of Barack Obama’s last acts as president, she was suddenly and unexpectedly granted clemency last year and freed.It’s a story that is as complex, complicated, conflicted and unresolved as perhaps Manning herself. The meaning, the significance, the consequences of what she did are not yet in any way settled or even stable. As Bradley Manning, she was the hero who blew the whistle on the US’s relationship with the rest of the world and its hypocrisy. Or the traitor who committed crimes under the Espionage Act and betrayed her country. For some people, it’s both.Because Manning was the techie who turned. Turned the technology against the country that had developed it, turned its foreign policy inside out, turned herself from Bradley into Chelsea and – an unforeseen consequence – turnedWikiLeaksfrom a fringe actor into a new force in global politics. Before Manning, Assange was a leaking organisation without a significant leaker.I didn’t leak because I’m trans. But certainly the values I have have been shaped by who I am, and there’s a connectionGoing to WikiLeaks was “instinctual”, she says. “I had this problem reaching out to theWashington Post. There was this lack of understanding about the dangers of [unencrypted] plain text communications at the time.” And she can’t or won’t reflect on what the organisation has become, if or how it’s changed over time and what role she played in ushering in an era of weaponised leaks that has led us to where we are now withRobert Mueller’s investigation of Trump-Russian collusion, an investigation that encompasses WikiLeaks’ pivotal role in the US election.Manning can’t talk about a lot of what happened in detail. She says the US army has reclassified many of the documents that were previously public – and she’s also writing a book – so there’s a hesitancy to give things away ahead of time. But it also seems to run deeper than that. She doesn’t try to second guess the choices she made.“I don’t re-litigate my decisions,” she says. She can’t entertain the idea of history – or herself – taking another path. She resists reflection. “What I really try to tell people is [that if] I had done anything differently I would have been a completely different person; I can’t go back through this analysis.” But then there are whole swaths of Chelsea Manning’s history that she hasn’t quite worked out how to tell. “I don’t have a story in my head,” she says in an off-the-cuff moment when I ask her why she’s batted off my personal questions in our formal interview. “Some of it I haven’t been able to talk about. Solitary confinement, I just can’t talk about. I’ve not been ready to talk about it. I’ve blocked it out. I just can’t…”She shrugs. “I don’t know. I just remember breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleep, breakfast, lunch. I keep going back to that because what I remember is that the routine was my centrepiece to staying grounded.”At her trial in 2013, the judge officially recognised the abuse she’d been subjected to in pretrial detention and took time off her sentence to reflect it. She spent months at a time in solitary confinement, on suicide watch, at times stripped naked. “It’s there every time I wake up,” she says. “There’s not a day that I don’t wake up and have memories of my experience [of prison] driving me to be talking about this.”FacebookTwitterPinterestManning is escorted from a Maryland court hearing in February 2012. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesIt seems unlikely that Manning’s trip to London last week will have made any of this any clearer. Stefan Kalmár, the ICA’s newish, politically minded director, had invited her to London to give a talk and be the guest of honour at a fundraising dinner hosted by Vivienne Westwood. It’s another jump cut for Manning. From a cage in the Kuwaiti desert, where she was exfiltrated after being caught while serving in Iraq, to the ICA’s Nash-designed villa a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. Westwood shocks the audience, a well-heeled, gender-fluid art crowd, by referring a number of times – sincerely, but forgetfully – to Chelsea as Bradley. “He was my hero,” she says as hostility ripples through the audience and people shout: “It’s Chelsea!”There’s been so many of these cuts in her story. Manning has lived more lives than most and she’s still only 30. Her aunt painted a brutal picture of childhood isolation and neglect at her trial – her parents had problems with alcohol, her mother with a history of psychiatric problems. Later, she plunged herself into one of the most hyper-macho environments imaginable – an army unit in a war zone – just as her discomfort at her outward appearance as a man was becoming unbearable. She changed her name to Chelsea and decided to live outwardly as a woman the day after she was sentenced to 35 years in another hyper-macho environment – a male prison. Another rupture.Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/07/chelsea-manning-wikileaks-whistleblowing-interview-carole-cadwalladr